Using newly digitized U.S. city-level data on hospitals, we explore how pandemics alter preferences for healthcare. We find that cities with higher levels of mortality during the Great Influenza of 1918-1919 subsequently expanded hospital capacity by more than cities experiencing less influenza...

The past century witnessed a dramatic improvement in public health, the rise of modern medicine, and the transformation of the hospital from a fringe institution to one essential to the practice of medicine. In this paper, we explore how access to the hospital and modern medicine affects...